Announcing Power BI Home General Availability (GA) & Roadmap

As organizations grow their Power BI deployments and foster a data culture, users will have an ever-increasing amount of data available to them. This wealth of information makes it critical to have tools to find and organize relevant content.

Last September, we took the first step in improving our overall navigation experience by introducing a public preview of Power BI Home. Home was built to provide users a personalized landing page where they can keep track of their key business metrics at-a-glance and have one-click access to their most important content. Thanks to all the feedback and support from our community, we’ve also been able to make improvements to the experience by adding features such as recommended apps, on-boarding video, and more.

Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve added more new capabilities and declared Power BI Home as generally available. What’s new in GA, you ask? Read on for an overview of the new capabilities and a roadmap of what we are working on next.

Note: We will be start to roll out new features for Home GA this week. It should be enabled for all users by April 30, 2019.

New features in Home GA

Here is an example of what Home will look like for a user with the latest GA features:

Workspaces

To all users who spend most of their time within workspaces, we added a dedicated section for you to access workspaces directly on Home. Like other sections on Home, the workspaces that you see here are sorted based how frequently you accessed the content list of that workspace; the only exception being My Workspace.

It gets better – not only will you be able to access your workspaces from this section, That’s right, workspaces will behave like first-class citizens in Power BI similar to apps, dashboards, and reports. You will also be able to see them under the Recents content list.

Note: As of now, workspaces can only appear under the Favorites + Frequents section if you access them frequently. If you don’t see workspace there, it probably means you have other content that you’ve accessed more, or you have more than nine favorites.

Favorite content

See something under the Favorites + Frequents section that you access daily and want to keep it there? Favorite it directly on Home! Now, you will see an empty star for all the items that you frequently use. Simply click on it to make it stay.

Note: The item that you just favorited will be sorted in alphabetical order under the Favorites + Frequents section when you return to Home the next time. We also don’t support favoriting workspaces.

Content type sub-text

Lastly, there may be instances where two artifacts (such as an app and a workspace) can have the same name. To help you quickly distinguish between the two on Home, we added a sub-text for each tile. You will now see that all your artifacts under Favorites + Frequents and Recents section have a sub-text describing the type of artifact.

Roadmap

Making Power BI Home as generally available is the first of many more milestones in improving the overall user experience in the service. We have more features and capabilities are on the way! Here’s an overview of what you can expect in the subsequent milestones scheduled for later this year:

Organizational branding – Allowing administrators to insert a company logo, change the header color, and add a background cover image on Home to match their corporate brand. Here’s a example of Contoso branding their Power BI tenant:

Promoted content – Allowing administrators or designated content creators to promote and set the default recommended content. By setting default content, an organization can ensure that users have a consistent and standardized experience for navigating within the service.

Configure learning resources – Allowing administrators to configure the documentation links in the “Learn how to use Power BI” section for their tenant.

User customization of pinned tiles – Allowing users choose which dashboards or reports show up on top of Home for an at-a-glance view of their key metrics.

Have comments, feedback, or ideas for next steps? We’d love to hear from you. You can vote on new feature ideas, or leave a comment below, or in the forums.